Regardless of skills, effort, alertness, confidence or speed, at some point a threat will be encountered that will damage you. That act is either a defining moment in your life (since it could be the beginning of the end of that life) or that damage is a minor inconvenience that you will deal with later. How do you tolerate pain? Everyone seems to be different in this respect, in degree of ability to ignore injury and continue with the task at hand. Women do tend to have a much higher pain tolerance than men, so women should be starting with a built-in advantage. If you’re male and you disagree with the preceding sentence, you’ve not fought many women who are self-assured and don’t take shit from others.

There is one assumption that can be made with a great degree of certainty, nor would it matter if this assumption proves incorrect, that being any living threat you face will not feel any pain at all. Both people and animals regularly show no sign of having been shot with any kind of firearm. They just continue the fight. This situation is one you may well be facing, so act accordingly. Interviews with “good guys” after gunfights often mention that if the good guy was hit, he didn’t even notice until the fight was over. There have been too many bad guys walking through bullets to think that they also don’t notice what is happening. That means you must not either, you must stay in the fight regardless of what your adversary has done to you.  If my assumption is wrong, that’s great. It means the bad guy gets dead really fast and you go have a beer.

There’s the worst case, direct involvement in a gunfight and you get hit. Conversely, while standing on a ladder at home changing a light bulb, the ladder collapses and you are now on the ground with a shattered bone in your leg. It’s not a fight, but you are just as damaged and will need somebody to put bones together, clamp off whatever’s spouting blood and get skin sewed together. Those things won’t likely happen if you’ve decided to roll around screaming like some little punk who picked the wrong wolf and finds he is suddenly missing an eye. While it’s tough to be relaxed and calm while bleeding on the furnishings, it can be done (at least to a degree where you can make rational decisions, like how to summon aid or what to do to patch yourself up until you can get assistance). The body’s shock mechanism, with what control you can add, also helps you survive since you may not notice or feel all the damage, giving you some moments to act.

Controlling pain is not some ninja martial arts master secret skill, though martial arts experience does help (through the learning of discipline, I think). The only skill required is a basic understanding that things will hurt you and you will then have to deal with an injury – or finish a fight and then deal with the injury. If given some thought now, while you are secure and not threatened, you’ll know what you must will yourself to do should something happen. Just going into a state of panic when you’re damaged means you can gamble on whether you lose your voice from screaming before you bleed to death. Hopefully, you’ll pass on both of those options.